Dundonian academic helped bring war to end

Sir Alfred Ewing was put in charge of Room 40, decoding intercepted messages

A Dundonian hastened the end of war, saving thousands of lives.

Alfred Ewing – more formally Sir James Alfred Ewing KCB FRS FRSE MInstitCE – was director of Room 40, the top-secret Admiralty military codebreaking unit.

Born in 1855, he attended the High School of Dundee before obtaining a scholarship to study engineering at Edinburgh.

In 1878, aged 23, Ewing was recruited as the first professor of engineering at the Imperial University in Tokyo.

After five years, he returned to work at University College, Dundee, as its first professor of engineering and worked alongside D’Arcy Thompson and fellow HSD FP Mary Lily Walker to combat poverty in the city.

After a post at King’s College, Cambridge, he became Director of Naval Education to the British Admiralty in 1903 and was knighted in 1911.

He came to the attention of the First Lord of the Admiralty – and Dundee MP – Winston Churchill.

Realising the military significance of signals intelligence, he approached Ewing to head Room 40 in the Admiralty the – a top secret group of brilliant minds tasked with cracking German naval and diplomatic codes.

Room 40 was so secret that its existence was denied until as late as the 1930s, but it evolved into the precursor of Bletchley Park and today’s GCHQ.

Room 40 decoded intercepted German cable and radio messages and passed the results to military and political leaders, warning of Zeppelin raids, cracking wireless transmissions from submarines, and enabling the Navy to keep tabs on the German Fleet.

Ewing’s greatest coup was Room 40’s success in cracking the encrypted Zimmermann Telegram, instrumental in bringing the USA into the war.

Germany could use America’s cables on the condition that transmissions were entirely peaceful but, with Room 40 listening in, on January 11 1917, foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann cabled Mexico suggesting in the event of war between the US and Germany, Mexico should attack with southern US states offered as reward. This, and other factors, saw the US enter the war, shortening it by an estimated year.

Ewing stood down from Room 40 in 1917 to focus on his role as principal and vice-chancellor of Edinburgh University. Dundee University’s School of Engineering, Physics and Mathematics bears his name and the James Alfred Ewing Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers has been awarded for engineering research since 1938.

He was granted the Freedom Dundee in 1933 and died in 1935. of

Sir Alfred Ewing’s codebreaking work helped to bring the US into the war, shortening it by approximately one year.